A former student dressed in black walked onto the stage of a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University and opened fire on a packed science class Thursday, killing five students, wounding 16 and setting off a panicked stampede before committing suicide.
Police say knew of no motive for the rapid-fire assault, carried out by a gunman who fired indiscriminately into the crowd with a shotgun and two handguns as students dived to the floor and ran toward the exit. Six of the wounded were hospitalized in critical condition.
“I kept thinking, ‘Oh God, he’s going to shoot me. Oh God, I’m dead. I’m dead. I’m dead,’ ” said Desiree Smith, a senior journalism major who dropped to the floor near the back of the auditorium.
“People were crawling on each other, trampling each other,” she said. “As I got near the door, I got up and I started running.”
University president John Peters said four people died at the scene, including the gunman, and the two others died at a hospital.
The teacher, a graduate student, was wounded but was expected to recover.
Peters said the gunman was a former graduate student in sociology at NIU but was not currently enrolled at the 25,000-student campus about 65 miles west of Chicago.
“It appears he may have been a student somewhere else,” university Police Chief Donald Grady said.
Witnesses said the skinny gunman, dressed in black and wearing a stocking cap, emerged from behind a screen on the stage of 200-seat Cole Hall and opened fire just as the class was about to end around 3 p.m.
Officials said 162 students were registered for the class, but it was unknown how many were there Thursday.
Lauren Carr said she was sitting in the third row when she saw the shooter walk through a door on the right-hand side of the stage, pointing a gun straight ahead.
“I personally army-crawled halfway up the aisle,” said Carr, a 20-year-old sophomore. “I said I could get up and run or I could die here.”
She said a student in front of her was bleeding, “but he just kept running.”
“I heard this girl scream, ‘Run, he’s reloading the gun.’ ”
Student Jerry Santoni was in a back row when he saw the gunman enter a service door to the stage.
“I saw him shoot one round at the teacher,” he said. “After that, I proceeded to get down as fast as I could.”
Santoni dived down, hitting his head on the seat in front of him, leaving a knot about half the size of a pingpong ball on his forehead.
Eighteen victims were brought to nearby Kishwaukee Community Hospital, where one died, according to spokeswoman Theresa Komitas.
One male was transferred in critical condition and died at OSF St. Anthony Medical Center in Rockford, an official said.
Minutes after the shooting, students phoned one another and sent text messages even before school officials could warn them, many said. The school website announced a possible gunman on campus within 20 minutes of the shots and the campus was locked down, part of a new security plan created after a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 people last year.
“This is a tragedy, but from all indications we did everything we could when we found out,” Peters said.
Michael Gentile was meeting with two of his students directly beneath the lecture hall when the shootings happened. He could hear the chaos a few feet above his head.
“The shotgun blast must have been so loud,” said Gentile, a 27-year-old media studies instructor. “It sounded like something was dropping down the stairs. . . . We had no idea what this was.”
Then came shorter, sharper noises he recognized as handgun shots.
“There was a pretty quick succession . . . just pow, pow, pow,” said Gentile, who didn’t leave his office for about 90 minutes. He used a surveillance camera just outside his office to confirm that the people knocking on his door were police.
Week of violence
The shooting was the fourth at a U.S. school within a week.
On Feb. 8, a woman shot two fellow students to death before committing suicide at Louisiana Technical College in Baton Rouge. In Memphis, Tenn., a 17-year-old is accused of shooting and critically wounding a fellow student Monday during a high school gym class, and the 15-year-old victim of a Tuesday shooting at an Oxnard, Calif., junior high school has been declared brain-dead.
